Polish socialist and Marxist Rosa Luxemburg dreams about revolution during the era of German Wilhelminism. While Luxemburg campaigns relentlessly for her beliefs, getting repeatedly imprisoned in Germany as well as in Poland, she spars with lovers and comrades until Luxemburg is assassinated by Freikorps for her leadership in the Spartacist uprising after World War I in 1919.
Miss von Trotta's film, with a fine, soberly intelligent performance by Barbara Sukowa (the seductive star of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola), is a first-rate introduction to an extremely complicated personality. It's necessarily simplified, as well as biased on behalf of those aspects of Luxemburg that will speak most clearly to today's audiences.
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